Digital Bradgate Park

For my Bradgate park project, I decided to go all digital for it. The reasons I decided this was because I wanted to improve hand eye coordination with the tablet, experiment a little more with Photoshop tools and techniques… and because Bradgate had terrible weather on the days we went! (Soaked)

With my thumbs I started off trying to get on with colour. It went alright but I ultimately decided that I wanted to improve my greyscale paintings as it’s relatively weak. I started off with the usual point perspectives but gradually moved onto adding subjects that made the paintings a little more interesting.

I went darker with my tones and experimented with a few things on Photoshop. Something I particularly liked was taking a soft brush and using it to add a light source in the distance. With the darker tones and the light source fuzzing the edges of the dark and the addition of adding people or a dog made it much more interesting to look at than the usual point perspectives. 

I had a problem that I wasn’t sure which computer screen I had was more accurate with the “truer” contrast and resolution so I was a little confused as which monitor to go with when enhancing the image to flesh out the contrast. It’s a problem that I will need to look into at some point very soon as I don’t want it to keep impeding with my work flow.

Anyways I ended up upping the contrast to suit the dimmer computer screen as it really killed the mood of how I wanted to portray my paintings.

For my final, I jumped right into colour. I didn’t want to keep drawing Bradgate as some depressing overcast park so I wanted to make it look a little happier. I painted the final with greener, brighter colours and a bright sky. I wanted to give a sort of blur in the background to not focus on the background and more into the river and foreground. However I think that I should actually add a bit more as it’s looking a little lacking….

I experimented with other types of default brushes in this piece. I didn’t think that it was going to make much of a difference but after trying some out, I for some reason had a better times with the trees. With the water, I took one of the dotted default brushes and tapped white onto the river as a finishing touch after colouring it in. I really like that glittery effect and in my opinion really adds to the life of my painting and helps achieve what I was going for. I heard some good advice from a friend that photos can often make the sky a bit too bright and not display the sky correctly. As he said the river has been painted blue so I could assume that the sky is also blue because of the water reflecting it.